Whitson Gordon

Readers offer their best tips for getting notifications for specific Gmail labels, making use of "dead" batteries, and making your word processor easier to read.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they're a bit too niche, maybe we couldn't find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn't fit it in—the tip didn't make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, email it to tips at lifehacker.com, or share it on our tips and expert pages.

Get Label-Specific Notifications for Gmail in Firefox

I've been wanting to get desktop notifications for labels other than inbox in Gmail, and I recently found a new Firefox add-on that can do this! It's called Gmail Notifier Restartless. After installing the extension you need to go to options page. There is a box named Gmail Feeds, to which you can append this string at the end of the box:

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/label

The label is the name of your label for which you want notifications.

Keep "Dead" AA Batteries for Low-Powered Devices

A tip for anyone thinking of tossing or recycling batteries that your whatever gadget says are dead or nearly there.

I have a kitchen drawer with enough AA batteries to keep my wall clock running for who knows how long. One of these supposedly drained batteries kept the clock going for over a year. Not to suggest that the others will hold out as long in a kitchen drawer but it would sure be a waste and a hazard to throw them out.

We've probably shared this tip before, but Moon's method of keeping them in a separate drawer is pretty handy. That way, you always have batteries on hand for something. Photo by GigerPunk.

Zoom to Page Width for Easier Window Management in Word Processors

If you are writing in Microsoft Word and working with multiple windows at once on your screen, go to View > Zoom > Page width, and the Word document's zoom will follow whatever the size of the window is. This makes things way easier when you are trying to resize your window and have to keep finding the right zoom.